3.14 Mourning

Dina:  I’m in a mood this morning. Stubborn. And maybe kind of mad.

Rich:  Take me there!

Dina:  I want to take away the pain of the world. All of it. How grandiose is that? But it’s what I want.

Rich:  And the problem with wanting that?

Dina:  It’s like you said, take the world to heart and you will hurt, how could you not? How could you not indeed. And me, I say it like this. Care about the world, want to take away it’s pain and you will hurt. Too much. Way too much.

Rich:  Tell me about stubborn.

Dina:  I don’t want to have to settle for less than getting rid of all the pain. I know I have to, but I don’t want to.

Rich:  And mad?

Dina:  It makes me so mad that I can have what I want. So what does that make me, being stubborn and mad and unrepentant?

Rich:  An activist.

Dina:  Clever. But what do I do with all this, these feelings that are too much for me, but I refuse to let them go?

Rich:  Question: Is this a dilemma for you?

Dina:  Spell it out.

Rich:  You’re trying to decide what to do with your caring and you’ve got two choices, each with a downside. You can choose to care about the world and hurt and hurt a lot and like you say, too much. Or you can choose to shut your heart down and not care and have a bit of peace.

Dina:  The way you stated that it sounds like it could be a dilemma, but for me it’s not.

Rich:  Because?

Dina:  I can’t shut down my heart. I won’t. I’ve worked too hard to open it up so I could be vulnerable with the people I love. So that means there aren’t two choices, only one, and thus no dilemma.

Rich:  Tell me how you made that decision to rule out that second choice.

Dina:  It’s a stand I’m taking for myself. And the way I see it, it’s a moral stand. I won’t shut down. I won’t go backwards. I won’t hurt myself like that. See that would be sacrificial and I don’t do sacrificial anymore.

Rich:  Okay, so if you don’t have a dilemma about your caring, what do you have?

Dina:  A challenge. A big, hunking challenge.

Rich:  There seems to be something here about trying to reconcile your caring about the world and your caring about yourself.

Dina:  That’s it exactly.

Rich:  Which it seems to me is one of the fundamental challenges of doing deep activist work in a world that is so filled with suffering.

Dina:  Thing is, talking with you and reading your stuff over the past few months, I’ve left the sacrificial part of the Sacrificial-Savior OS behind. And I feel really good about that. That’s me taking care of me.

But I haven’t left the savior part behind. I still want to save the world. I want that really bad. And it’s killing me that I can do that. I hate that there’s so much pain, I just hate it.

Rich:  Take a moment and look back at the last few months. Are there any elements of playing savior that you have in fact let go of?

Dina:  Now that you mention it, yeh. I’ve ditched the approval thing. I’m taking a stand for myself that I won’t work for approval anymore. It’s not satisfying. I work to meet the longing that I feel in my heart to make things better.

Rich:  That’s big. Let me ask you, are you actually holding on to the savior game apart from your longing to get rid of pain?

Dina:  You know, you’re right! That’s really the only part of the SSOS I’m holding onto.

Rich:  How about if we question that? Does the SSOS own caring?

Dina:  Hell no. I see what you’re saying. This stubbornness and this mad and this caring, that’s all mine. I own it.

Rich:  Yes. And congratulations.

Dina:  Oy, okay, hooray for me and all that, but what do I do with this caring? It’s trouble?

Rich:  Wait a second, you sped right past the congrats. How important are people like you? People whose hearts are filled to overflowing with caring.

Dina:  I’d hate to live in a world without people like me. If everyone walked around shut down, that would be brutal.

Rich:  Just think about your caring, focus in tightly on just that. Are you okay with it.

Dina:  In and of itself, yes, I’m okay with it. I like it. I like it a lot. It’s one of my favorite things about me.

Rich:  So would be say the problem show up when your caring bumps into the world? A world that stubbornly refuses to be healed, let alone be saved.

Dina:  I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but I think that’s it, the nub of the problem.

Rich:  Have you ever had a friend who was screwing up her life and you tried to step in and save her but she refused and you hit the wall?

Dina:  Meaghan.

Rich:  What’s that story?

Dina:  We used to travel in the same circles and she seemed drawn to me, she liked to hang out with me, but she drove me crazy. She was doing such stupid things in her life, making such a mess. But when I tried to talk some sense into her she would smile and nod and then ignore everything I said.

Rich:  It made you crazy?

Dina:  Yes, it was so obvious to me what she needed to do to fix her life. I laid it out for her. I was willing to help her make those changes. I really, really wanted things to be better for her. But nothing.

Rich:  So you were playing savior with her?

Dina:  Damn, I guess I was. Didn’t see that at the time.

Rich:  But it sounds like that’s in the past.

Dina:  We run into each other every few months and have a coffee together at a café, but when the coffee’s gone, I’m gone.

Rich:  Do you feel bad about that?

Dina:  Yeh. I still want to help her, it’s just that I’ve wised up and realize I can’t. There’s nothing I can give her.

Rich:  Let’s say a year from now she went through a crisis and woke up and saw what a wreck her life is and decided to get help, might she call you?

Dina:  I think that’s a very good possibility.

Rich:  Why?

Dina:  Because she knows I care about her, even from a distance. And she’s experienced me trying to help her in the past. And she knows that I can see what’s going wrong and that I have really good ideas about what might help.

Rich:  And how happy would it make you if she asked for your help.

Dina:  Very happy. But this time I wouldn’t try to save her. I’d help her save herself. And I think she can sense that because I’m not playing savior with her anymore. She can’t get that from me. So when she’s ready to step up on her own, she might well think of me.

Rich:  So you are standing in a place of eager readiness. True? Not true?

Dina:  I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, but yes, that’s exactly how it is.

Rich:  Why wouldn’t that count as doing something?

Dina:  Because it’s not an action.

Rich:  What is readiness?

Dina:  Okay, it’s a something. I don’t know what to call it.

Rich:  I’d call it a gift. You are giving her something, even though she’s not taking it. And doesn’t that count for something?

Dina:  Yeh, actually I’d have to admit that counts for a lot. I’m thinking about how I turned to Gina for help when my relationship with Marty was going south. I knew she was smart about relationships, and knew me and Marty well, and could really help. And this mattered to me that she was there even before I asked her for help.

Rich:  And Meagan?

Dina:  I’m going to choose to believe that I’ve giving her a very important gift even though I’m only standing by in readiness.

Rich:  And what do you do with your sadness about her, and her refusal of help?

Dina:  I try not to feel it because there’s nothing I can do with it. But what are you thinking? I know you’re headed somewhere with this.

Rich:  I’m headed to mourning.

Dina:  Mourning, how strange. Except maybe not.

Rich:  What are you thinking about? Or maybe I should ask, who are you thinking about?

Dina:  My grandmother. When she died I cried and cried. The crying just poured out of me. I couldn’t stop it.

Rich:  That’s very different than my family where people were stoic and restrained in the face of death.

Dina:  We were so close and I couldn’t stand losing her. I couldn’t stand it. It was like I was a rebel. Protesting. I was so sad and so angry at the same time.

Rich:  Did anyone try to calm you down?

Dina:  Yes. Two months in people started wondering if I was taking this too hard.

Rich:  You know there are experts who say you should mourn for a little bit, decorously, then get over it and move on.

Dina:  I’m not over it. I still miss her every day. I wasn’t decorous. And I’m glad.

Rich:  Glad?! Why?

Dina:  Because my sobbing said how much she meant to me.

Rich:  And if you had been like the people in my family, stoic, holding it all in?

Dina:  Oh that would have been terrible. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I just have this profound feeling that my grandmother’s spirit, could feel how much I loved her by how deeply I mourned her loss. And you know what? My relationship with her is still happening, and it’s deepening. The more I deepen who I am, the more deeply I find myself in that relationship.

Rich:  But there are experts who say that’s a problem, there’s even a DSM mental health diagnosis for holding on too long.

Dina:  Well, who gets to say how long is too long? And to hell with those experts anyway. My grandmother means more to me than all those experts put together and stuck in a boat without a paddle and pushed out to sea.

Rich:  So what does your mourning for your grandmother give you?

Dina:  It gives me me. It keeps me true to the relationship I had with her.

Rich:  So can mourning provide nurturance?

Dina:  I see what you’re saying. Yes! Mourning her has been very good for me. And there are still days when suddenly I think of her and my eyes fill with tears. And I don’t want those days to ever stop coming.

Rich:  It seems to me that mourning is a way of turning sadness into nurturance. Might that be true for you, too?

Dina:  It definitely is.

Rich:  So is there such a thing as activist mourning?

Dina:  Interesting phrase. Never thought of such a thing. But it makes sense. Caring deeply about a world in such deep trouble has got to be serious trouble for us activists. No way around that.

Rich:  Which means…

Dina:  We need to get as serious as we possibly can about taking care of ourselves and each other.

Rich:  How stubborn is the world in its refusal to be saved?

Dina:  Very, very stubborn. Which makes me very, very mad. You know there’s that workshop lady who preaches that we should Make our peace with the universe “love what is.” I’m not doing that. I hate that the world is so full of suffering and refuses so adamantly to fix itself.

Rich:  Back to Meagan for a minute. What would it mean to mourn her.

Dina:  Oh, I know I need to do that. Feel the sadness, let it pass through me instead of holding onto it. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach right now. And, OMG, do you think that back when I was trying to save her, maybe I was carrying her sadness so she didn’t have to?

Rich:  Looking back, what do you think.

Dina: I think that’s what was happening. And it was one reason she liked hanging out with me so much. The more she told me about her life, the more I sucked in her sadness and the lighter she got. OMG. And now I know what you’re going to ask me next.

Rich:  Go ahead and ask it.

Dina:  What about me and the world? Am I holding the world’s sadness so the world doesn’t have to stop up and carry all that itself. Wow. I think I suddenly understand now the worst damage playing savior does. When I took on Meagan’s sadness, she was able to coast. But she needed her sadness. She needed it to be inside her. She needed it to hurt her. Because otherwise she’s not motivated enough to get serious about making changes. Changes that would be serious and go deep, but which would make all the difference for her.

Rich:  And then…

Dina:  The world. Same thing. I need to carry my sadness. But I definitely do not need to carry the world’s sadness. That’s the part that’s too much.

Rich:  And how might mourning help you out with this?

Dina:  I need to mourn, first, that I can’t fix the world. I want to and I can’t. But that’s not on me, that’s on the world. A world that’s being impossible. And second, I need to mourn myself.

Rich:  Meaning?

Dina:  Let me see how to put this. I need to mourn that my caring is so intense that it causes me trouble. But, but check this out, I need to mourn it while I celebrate it. And honor it. And embrace it. And oy.

Rich:  Oy?

Dina:  Being human sure is complicated isn’t it?

Rich:  Indeed.

Dina:  So my activist caring is a blessing while it’s also trouble. And I have to live with that. Or I get to live with that. It does make life an adventure.

Rich:  I have a lot of happy things to say about the DNOS, but there’s an awful lot of sorrow that comes with it. By contrast, the SSOS is deep with despair.

And the way I like to think about this is that I choose the sorrow, because sorrow is a living thing, whereas despair is not.

Dina:  I choose sorrow, too. That’s so clear to me now. Starting today, I’m choosing it.

You know, this deep mourning we’re talking about, feeling deeply for myself like this, makes me want to fight for myself. And the people I care about. And people in general.

Rich:  So maybe we could call this generative mourning. Because it generates nurturance.

Dina:  Which generates nurturing action.

Rich:  Which is the heart of nurturing activism.

Dina:  And you know what I love best. The feeling of joy I’m noticing right now, deep in my heart, here in the midst of a scary, sad world.

Rich:  I love hearing that.

Dina:  I’m on a tear now. And next time we talk I just might have a whole lot more to say about mourning.

Rich:  I can’t wait!